Did You “Do” School Today?

This is a guest post from former contributor Amy Schuff of AmySchuff.com.

Did You “Do” School Today?

“Did you do school today?” My photography client asked me, genuinely curious about our day.

“Uhhhh,” the question caught me off guard. “Or just some of the subjects?” She backtracked. I laughed inside, and then my laughter poured out as I thought over our day and what we accomplished by way of “school.” I was about to be sassy and tell her all we did was eat cake and watch TV, but I didn’t want to play at the question. To me, the kids and I had a great day, absolutely wonderful, but I thought of words to try and explain what we actually did and I fell short. So what was I to do? I guess honesty is the only way, whether my client understood or not…

“Well,” I started, “We went to the store, so there’s character building for ya!” (Ha ha…I joked…it’s not a joke…)

“We did some reading,” which to anyone else is a small sentence, but to me it encompasses 90% of what I, as a homeschooling Mom, is all about. “We did math on the iPad!” Does she get that my son can learn more with 15 minutes of playing Hay Day on the iPad than he could in an hour in a workbook? “My husband did Bible with them,” which isn’t even the tip of the iceberg since their Daddy doesn’t just do Bible…he full on creates Lego Garden of Eden, play dough resurrection scenes, and encourages prophetic worship while he plays the guitar in the background.

Then I paused, how do I convey how I homeschool? How do I make her understand how a day goes? How do I explain how my kids played together, laughed together, made each other lunch, watched shows on the lives of the indigenous people of Antarctica, did their chores, loved on the dog and their mama and how we, as a family, all sat down to eat dinner together, ending the day with hugs and kisses while the big kids read under their covers deep into the night?

So…did we do school today? The sassy answer? Absolutely. And every day since.

To me, this is called unschooling. Each day is differently the same, we love, laugh, learn and most importantly, we live life together.

I understand that this way of school is not for every family. Some mothers thrive under the guidance of curriculum, weekly lesson planning, and time frames. If you’re one of those moms, I hope you will still read my articles! I have so much to learn from you and I hope something I say will be an encouragement to you.

I am very honored to be the newest team member of “Managing Your Blessings” and to be writing from the unschooler’s perspective. I hope what I’m able to do is to enable the unschooling mother to answer the age-old question of “Did you do school today?” with confidence, direction, and a bit of sass. Because this much I know, we’re a sassy bunch, us unschoolers. I figure we’ve got to be if we’re going to answer the question of what we did all day long!